This proseminar surveys major American literary periods,
genres, artistic movements, and authors from the twentieth to the twenty-first
century. We will discuss author biographies and historical contexts, as well as
representative texts and formal markers for each period. Building on these
foundational discussions, we will develop our own critical readings and
interpretations, bringing to bear both classical and recent critical theories. Our
goals will be to develop a holistic sense of the evolving American literary
canon and to hone our critical-analytical and argumentative skills. Modernism(s)
nominally present the dominant (and arguably ongoing) strain in American
literary production for much of the last century. Americans at home and abroad
dealt with experiences of expansion, technological advancement, mushrooming
wealth, war, social and racial strife, and existential loss. Authors like F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes explored the possibility of making society
and culture “new,” while W.E.B. DuBois produces the first systematic theory of
the African American experience. Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot experimented
with topics and form to sound the pliability of identity. However, literary
periods are not cut and dry, and the transitions from one aesthetic current to
the next are blurry and ambivalent. We begin our survey with Realism,
Modernism’s predecessor and the major movement of the nineteenth century, which
emerged from a newly minted, burgeoning middle class. Authors like Henry James
and William Dean Howells sought to cast writing as a form of scientific inquiry
and explored through literature the mechanics of social stratification. Naturalism
emerges from the in-between spaces of Realism, with authors beginning to
displace humans from the center of their thinking. Stephen Crane and Frank
Norris, for instance, saw humans in the clutches of overwhelming, faceless
forces, both natural and economic. At the dusk of Modernism, late- or
postmodernist writers explore the textual nature of reality. Sandra Cisneros
depicts immigrant and broader existences, George Saunders sounds existential
themes under modern capitalism, and N.K. Jemisin examines the impact of
technology and a revitalized interest in collective political action.
